what is the authoritative text of the Book of Mormon?

I’m working on a couple of projects right now (one professional, one personal) that have me asking the question that makes up the title of this post. While working on one of those projects last night (the personal one), I came across the verse that is Alma 5:5 in Community of Christ versification and Alma 7:12 in LDS versification. For this project, I’m reading out of the 1830 text of the Book of Mormon, as captured on WIkisource, and when I read over the verse, something felt off to me:

and he [Jesus] will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to suffer his people acccording to their infirmities.

Besides the three c’s in “according,” the phrase “how to suffer his people” felt wrong to me. Not only does it not make much sense, but I remembered the phrase reading as “succor his people according to their infirmities,” which frankly makes a lot more sense. I checked Royal Skousen’s Analysis of Textual Variants, and sure enough:

Here the printer’s manuscript and the 1830 edition read suffer. The 1837 edition replaced suffer with succor, probably intentionally (although this change was not marked in P by Joseph Smith in his editing for the 1837 edition). All subsequent editions have retained succor.

Here, “P” is the printer’s manuscript, distinguished from “O,” the original manuscript, which is not fully extant. The existence of two separate manuscripts before the Book of Mormon even went to print (and the knowledge, based on surviving fragments of the original manuscript, that there are differences between them) raises the question of which of them ought to be authoritative. This question is further complicated by the existence of 1830 and 1837 editions, the latter of which involves a number of changes to the text introduced by Joseph Smith himself. Are Smith’s edits in 1837 more authoritative than his original dictation in 1830?

Of course, as Skousen also points out, the introduction of this specific change in the 1837 edition can’t quite be pinned down:

It is quite possible that the original manuscript read succor and that scribe 2 of P miscopied the word as suffer, especially since succor and suffer are orthographically similar. We should note that in one place in the original manuscript Oliver Cowdery spelled succor as succer (Alma 57:12). If the original manuscript had the same spelling of succer here in Alma 7:12, then the conjectured misreading as suffer by scribe 2 in the printer’s manuscript would be all the more plausible. Indeed, a spelling such as sucker would be even more susceptible to being misread as suffer (but there are no instances of that misspelling in the manuscripts).

Another possibility is that the scribe in O misheard Joseph Smith’s succor as the phonetically similar suffer and thus wrote down suffer in O. It’s also possible that Joseph himself misread succor as suffer as he dictated the text.

I want to draw attention to the last sentence here, because it takes for granted that Joseph was not merely dictating a text but reading it aloud off of words that appeared in the seer stone he typically used for the “translation” process. Skousen’s Critical Text Project is a veritable goldmine for engaging with the Book of Mormon, but it’s important to note that this is functionally an apologetic argument, that the Book of Mormon was divinely revealed to Smith—to the extent that he was provided the text word for word as he peered into a stone.

In my other, academic project related to the Book of Mormon text, I’m drawing off of authors like John-Charles Duffy (and using frameworks provided by Jacques Ellul, perhaps to no one’s surprise) to make the argument that this “word for word” understanding aligns with a desire to make a clearly authoritative text that must be conformed to by its reader. However, for all of Skousen’s apologetic commitments, the uncertainty of the suffer / succor change in the text points out just how difficult it is to determine which of the differing texts of the Book of Mormon ought to be understood as the authoritative one. Can it be the one purportedly read off of a seer stone by Smith if Smith later made changes to that text? Can we agree that succor is the authoritative reading if we don’t have a provenance for that change?

Skousen and I (and countless others) would surely disagree as to the ultimate significance of these ambiguities, but it’s important to recognize that there are ambiguities. The Book of Mormon is famously held by LDS-flavored believers to be “the most correct of any book on earth,” but even if that were true, it woiuldn’t mean that there aren’t questions that need to be resolved. In this particular case, which of the texts available to us is that “most correct” book? Latter-day Saint authorities have turned the exact wording of particular verses into theological observations before, and that assumes a word-for-word correctness to the book that is not always clear.

• Book of Mormon
• Royal Skousen
• Joseph Smith Jr.
• John-Charles Duffy
• Jacques Ellul